he was great in oz
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Ghosts is one of the most racist Call of Duty games (a truly special feat), and Infinite Warfare has an incoherent story AND the protagonist is a Bloom self-insert AND the final mission is insanely stupid. Bloom is just clownishly bad at writing. He’s good in Oz though I agree.
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No infinite warfare has a great story and that story is “what if the robot from interstellar had a gun and was my best friend and would hold me as I’m dying in the cold vacuum of space.”
mw1 alternates between a rookie guy being groomed into becoming a real deal dead inside super terrorist killer man and a long dead inside cia man in search of a righteous cause who finally sees one in the kurdish resistance, that’s pretty good.
so far black ops 6 (which was just recently listed on bloom’s imdb page, I wasn’t sure if he’d be writing this one but it sounded like he was credited as narrative director for cod as a whole now on the last one) seems to just be the standard classic american story of going rogue for a couple of hours to kill a couple of bad people so the right people can take their place and everyone understands then you just go back to your job and don’t get executed for treason or terrorism or have to spend life on the run, but I’m into the characters. Especially the main guy (the guy on the cover, not the silent guy you play as, which is kind of weird to me coming from the mw reboots even though I guess that’s more cod tradition) who just seems cool and the morrocan lady sev, who you help assassinate some men she has a vendetta against and when you first meet her she’s listening to head like a hole.
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Hoooly moooly it’s been so long since I’ve posted about video games. I’ve played a lot of them though!
Lies of P
I am so happy that a game with such a silly name is so peak. I’d describe Lies of P as like, the sultry lover to Dark Souls’ pervert - it’s luxurious, plays like a treat, never tempts you to google esoterica, but probably isn’t The One. Plays like a very loving Bloodborne fanfiction, but I think it’s appealing in a way a bit closer to Sekiro insofar as I think it’s most rewarding if you’re there to Smack Guys and Get Better At Smacking Guys. It’s still making me happy and satisfied in a way Elden Ring and its DLC can’t, just by being a fucking reasonable videogame that isn’t engaged in an arms race with its players.
Level spoiler talk: Absolutely hilarious how it discards its robotopia aesthetic for the middle third to give you Resident Evil Village for 10 hours. Genuinely. Like, I adore the first half of Brightstone Cove in DS2 precisely because it feels like I just rocked up to Shrek 2 for the PC. Absolutely no sense of identity. Awesome.
Mouthwashing
Lotta people talking about this one! I really enjoyed playing this one with my beloved, although I can tell it’s not going to stay with me like How Fish is Made did. While the core story and its character dynamics were well written, I didn’t think it entirely justified its constant timeline jumps and abstract sections. Extremely hilarious to have gratuitous survival-hide-from-monster segments in your narrative horror game after we clowned on SOMA so much.
No Case Should Remain Unsolved
I’m really captured by the presentation. It’s so important and so hard to just keep information organised in a way that’s useful to you, that the more or less inevitable unfolding of the mystery, without necessarily requiring much deduction on your part, still felt like a real puzzle and certainly gave me a lot of time to think about what was happening. It’s a game about who is who, and keeping track of that did have quite a few moments that delighted and surprised me.
Rain Code+: Master Detective Archives
I was eagerly awaiting this one coming to PC!!! I am, lock me up, a big Danganronpa fan. It was a defining fixture of my teens and definitely influences me and my work in ways I’ll always be unpacking, lol. Rain Code is the big budget successor to Danganronpa, with all the triumphs and failures of Kodaka as a project lead, and being 2 chapters in so far I’m pretty impressed? Art direction is absolutely incredible. Everyone looks so cunty! Not even an old jaded man can get away with having less than three lip piercings. The first case/mystery was absolutely incredible, to the point that I have no idea how the game will top it (and hasn’t, yet). A huge fakeout, and a late-stage twist that I managed to piece together deliciously ahead of time.
I do unforch feel a lot about Rain Code vs. Danganronpa as I do about, like, Persona 5 versus 3/4, where the increased production value belies a fundamentally weaker premise and use of its pieces. The killers and victims both are less established, emotionally invested characters, and investigation is also less interpersonal. I’ll also never fuckin get over anime games with a bunch of mocap. Still waiting for a series to go 3D anywhere near as well as Ace Attorney did!!!
Slender: The Arrival
Lol. Got really high and played this with my beloved on her 360. Sure was a game. Anyone know if you can still play the old version now that they’ve like, patched it with Big Unreal Graphics? What a time to re-release something like this, you can feel the like, pre-emptive stagnation of a pretty young genre in every minute. Not something I would pick to return to.
Animal Well
Came in having heard of the ARG stuff, that the “real game” begins after you beat the regular game, but I played the regular game and I’m happy. Fuckin genius to have all your quirky puzzle-solving items be literal kids toys, because yeah, of course basing your design on objects of pure play is going to produce playful and emergent outcomes!
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Absolute dealbreaker
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kind of, yeah!
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The melee combo system in the RE4 remake is driving me insane. Why did they fuck with it, it was perfect in 5/6 (4 didn’t let you stun with arm shots). Leon has three different kicks he can do if you headshot a guy now? Which is fucking awful because it’s random, and one of them sucks real bad because it doesn’t hit in an arc like the original re4 kick and you can miss enemies really easily with it. They’re also all weaker, like you could kill ganados breaking out of a grab before and that doesn’t happen anymore. The days of head exploding are over! It’s all about this knife parry bullshit now, and the knife SUCKS. You can use it to escape from a grab…which you can’t parry…and you still take a ton of damage. Plus when you get grabbed from behind it does damage for some reason even though in the original and in RE5 it didn’t do any damage, it just set you up for another enemy to hit you. So Leon can parry a fucking guy swinging a chainsaw at him with all his might, or chop a ganado’s arm off for trying to hit him, but you’re expected to like…crouch under grabs even though the animation is slow as fuck? And why does it take more knife durability to stab a ganado that’s standing up versus one that’s on its knees? The whole thing with durability is just completely fucked. The knife executions take more durability than just stabbing the ganados to death during the village battle.
I also like that the combat knife description says it’s the same one Leon got from Marvin in RE2 even though you use like 100 different knives in that game. They seem to have realized having a melee weapon was important to the game mechanics because you can find a bunch of shitty knives everywhere so why not just ditch the durability like the RE3 remake…which did it because it’s theoretically a more action focused game…like RE4…
The way Leon moves is not doing the game any favors either. Trying to do the suplex is terrible because the leg stun animation lasts like 1 second even though all the other stun animations are really long and even if you manage to get behind them sometimes Leon will just kick them like you did it from the front anyway. And even if you do suplex a ganado it won’t stop them from transforming because their fucking heads don’t fucking explode anymore!! Fuck!!!
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hypnospace is starting to hook me in more and get a lot cooler despite complaints other people have made that i agree with (too squeaky clean… needs more angsty teens to spice things up)
BUT…
it is starting to feel WAY too much like what i do already for my youtube videos lol… dig around 90s websites, trying to find information and links that can lead me to more lol. i had a real “wait i was just doing this last night trying to find that tetris game that says ‘fuck’” moment
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This was literally why I bounced off it. I love doing what you do in this game in real life and in real life it’s more satisfying.
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This should be its own topic (<-- this poster is Lazy)
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god, thank you.
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I’ll post more later but I’m playing a CYOA game on my phone, Eldrum: Untold. It’s quickly climbing the ranks as one of my favorite of this kind of game. I had zero expectations going in so it’s a really pleasant surprise.
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quick thoughts on igf plays so far:
Judero - posted abt the writing in this in its own thread but i enjoyed that part a lot. the gameplay sorta feels vestigial but you can tell they had a lot of fun using that as a framework for hanging bits and pieces off - like the psychedelic enemy introduction cutscenes.
Neighbours - has a collage style which i liked all the more for it being really rough and digital looking instead of polished and neat. bizarrely vestigial plot/writing for a detective game. player character physics mean you can speedtech yourself almost off the screen which is quite charming, is pretty nothing otherwise.
Hell No - student game abt being an intern in the chinese afterlife. has a really blunt and stupid sense of humour which made me laugh more than most videogame jokes. it’s short and proof of concepty like yknow a student game BUT it feels like they had fun and it has a bit more juice as a result than the official indie version of the same idea, which is all i’m looking for with these.
Bloomsome - kind of a message game about shaping flower petals into artificial standards of beauty etc, short and janky but the petals were nice. i wasnt sure how to mention this in the hallowed halls of the igf forums but the flower body image analogies get quite weird - at one point you’re explicitly asked to make a flower’s boobs bigger which you do by like dragging its handlike leaf parts onto its “chest” and hitting them with the injection to make them bigger…?? unexpected conkers bad fur day homage or what
Year Unknown - i thought some of the 3d spaces in this were very cool and striking even with how oversaturated lowpoly videogame brutalism can be. the narrative about talking to AIs about the meaning of art and stuff is like mostly boring but likeable, but it started to bug me how bluntly it started going in on this message of ohhh in a perfect world people will be bored all the time. its 2024 man some boredom sounds good about now. i’m ok with material abundance EVEN IF it means an unkillable robot caretaker ends up really sad in the future. this is just my fucked up mind…
Extreme Evolution - i know this already has some fans here and they’re right, this game rules. seems at first like it’ll be a punishingly inscrutable thing easier to admire than to like but in a few minutes you start to get to grips with its weird, gnarled, personal design language and how loosely and generously it lets you engage with it. so many surprising and funny effects. probably GOTY??
Disbarred - student courtroom drama with a very agreeable constructed-out-of-roblox-assets feeling. every time your guy submits evidence it starts a new bizarre minigame - for example having to point a gun AWAY from a milling crowd as it fires at random and your arm moves around, or having to find an object on the floor in a room of milling NPCs. fun but quite brutal in some of the asks.
Mouthwashing - i liked this one a lot and it has a great understated design sensibility where it’s very willing to just show you something, or let you do it in an abstracted videogame way, and only put the pieces together after the fact. HOWEVER… idk i feel like a curmudgeon over this but i sort of felt this design slickness was at odds with the story they ended up trying to tell. it goes for “raw” but all i could think of was how trope-y the constituent pieces are: bluecollar space workers, male guilt as an excuse to render cool hell spaces and call it psychology which is something i was tired of in the days of Braid and “Edmund”. it’s incredibly good and confident as a lowpoly horror thing but to me isn’t really MORE than a lowpoly horror thing in the way it initially seemed like it might be. which is fine and so many of the pieces are good but in the end i guess i wished they were content to do a really good version of a 2020s horror game instead of a kind of boring version of a 2010s artgame.
Mexico, 1921 - some cool history i wasn’t familiar with that sort of feels like it was crammed into a cookie cutter model of how to “do” games narrative - a gimmicky photo mode and microobjectives and Choices and so on. its a shame bc the history that spills out and overflows that model is interesting and handled well but i just felt such dread at the idea of continuing to wander around as this 3d guy having robotic conversations about it.
Crow Country - idk its just two things to me. you need three things to make a videogame.
Unveiling - i liked this one probably more than i shouldve bc it ends up in a very rote art-walking-simulator place but the opening sections, very earnestly trying to represent UFO abductions in the odd charged manner of actual encounter reports about “strange lights” rather than more literal and familiar movie imagery, i enjoyed a lot. hard not to have a soft spot for a game which has such reverence for UFOs, even if it eventually goes for some disappointingly moralistic offscreen aliens.
Gloomy Juncture - weird noir pastiche adventure game with some of the most crazily elaborate and annoying adventure game puzzles i’ve seen since the cd rom era. a very pretty Pencil Whipped esque art style it unfortunately kind of buries under dramatic lighting. the writing feels like a bad imitation of bukowski or someone which is honestly kind of charming compared to so many other games with writing that’s a bad imitation of, idk, the ted lasso guys.
People Mountain People Sea - little walking sim set on islands of giant premade asset store nude bodies. very small and slight but theres a wonderful part where you cross a bridge right into the gentle curve of an ass, which you glide up with the default unity character controller, which i found very endearing.
Implied Abstraction - another student game, kind of a multimedia platformer abt hopping around where all the platforms are windows vista toolbars and stuff. made me think about what a disservice we’re doing these kids by making them learn boring overrefined platformer design bc something abt the goofy delight this had in gimmicks and effects made me think it wouldve shone as like a Jazz Jackrabbit style inscrutable DOS maze game.
Wingless Fairies - detourns the ocarina of time fairy shrines into gay bars which is funny but i wish the narrative was as willing to be annoying and perverse bc it felt very edges sanded off. its about working at the fairy shrine and having some dumb kid wander in and take energy from it and disappear back unthinkingly into their own lives but everyone’s so nice and responsible that it never gave me any feeling of like give n take or imposition or anything. its cool seeing OoT style models rigged and animated vtuber style though i hope more nobudget games do something similar for 3d animation in future.
Bauhaus Bonk - kiiiiiinda kuru kuru kururin adjacent in gameplay which is obviously good but so slickly mobile-optimised and afraid of being unfair that it becomes totally nothing instead.
Consume Me - i always wondered about this one bc i saw it in the works for years and it was hard to get a sense of whether all the twitter gifs would add up to something. but it came out really good in my opinion. like there’s a constant, casual moment to moment inventiveness of how it represents things and fits them into a swipe and touch design language that never felt forced to me, and more importantly its also willing to let that stuff drop and explore other forms of storytelling when it feels right rather than just being locked into the message-art-but-with-thematically-appropriate-gameplay hole. genuinely funny moments with some great cartooning.
tapeçaria (tapestry) - really cool seeming plunderludics thing that i couldnt get running on my pc bc its functionally like a dozen emulator windows running at once and being stitched together into unity. i wish it worked though bc there’s something hypnotic about a slow fade from playing as link majoras mask to playing as bubsy bobcat 3d with the same controls and no sense of a firm line between one and the next
there are some others that caught my eye so if i check them out i will post…
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whoever decided the remake needed extreme weapon sway and non-hitscan projectiles, the stupid FOCUS SHOT shit that fucks you over whenever you have to lead a target because moving your aim to adjust makes the crosshair bloom again and makes your shots stagger less, is such a dumb asshole
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This year has had a ridiculous number of strong releases but I think this is still my pick.
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controller labeled senario from a thrift store that comes with 25 games with various amounts of assets from other games and universally terrible music
best thing on it is this moai columns
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Booted up Cave Story on the Miyoo Mini. Forgot how floaty the playforming is, not a fan of the buttons not being able to be rebound and jump/shoot being the opposite face buttons of what they should be. Music and graphics are still charming.
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Oh my god, I’m not the only one who remembers this thing! It’s my go-to “worst game you’ve ever played” deep cut. Gross!
edit: i do not recommend reading the 2009 tigsource thread but god the present doesn’t seem so bad sometimes.
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I promised myself I wouldn’t badmouth UFO 50 any more… >_>
ANYWAYS, I am now some hours into Torment: Tides of Numenera and aside from a creeping dread that it isn’t particularly great I am struck by one main thought: I have absolutely no idea what any of the various systems do and am concerned that will become an issue. I finally got sucked into battle/crisis that required me to do stuff, naturally I tried to cheese it via running away after each encounter to sleep but even at this I nearly lost/died (I missed at least four straight attacks, can’t tell if it was just bad rolls or I was missing something) but eventually realized the trick and got through it without much issue. I have leveled up a few times and I have no real idea what I should be doing here (edge I got and seems useful) as I can barely parse what the supposed combat benefits are, I apparently have abilities and stuff I don’t recall how to access, I have no idea what the artifacts and cyphers are for beyond making me sick, I’m not even sure if I am supposed to be buying a shield or other equipment. I get the feeling that stealth exists but I am unsure how.
So… I talk and read and pray that the game doesn’t ask me to do more than that. This means that I am basically roleplaying as a huckster coward trying to scam his way past everything without having to lift a finger and fortunately the game supports said choice, but I worry I’ll hit a mandatory boss-esque battle and just be completely fucked.
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Verdict from a few days later is that Voidwrought is an ok enough game but I can definitely not recommend it to anyone. There’s just so much crap to purchase in the four or so shops in the game, icluding the door to the final boss. There are so many subweapon types that don’t really do much to differentiate themselves or tell you how much damage they do, so in practice I ended up using the one to power up the melee attack the entire game along with the one that lets you create a grappling hook point anywhere once you get it. Most of the other ones are some sort of horizontal projectile or one that arcs like the castlevania axe. Some of them explode.
the part I found really unforgivable was the multiple ending stuff. There’s stuff that gets decided in a dialog that happens near the very end, and the game autosaves as soon as you make the decision so if you wanto to see what happens when you make a different choice you’re going to have to replay the whole game. Also being given the choice at all requires some fairly completionist play so you aren’t going to get to the point where the dialog comes up again without putting in double digit hours. And there’s another one of those decisions in a different endgame area.
I’m already playing a metrovania, your game does not need an additional time sink to keep people from claiming a refund on steam.
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